1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to maintaining service subscription information of third party services provided in a telecommunications networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current cellular telecommunications networks are mostly aimed at providing basic telephony services to subscribers. Additional services are provided by network owners or operators. In the coming years, new players will provide a wider range of value-added services to subscribers. In order to do so, these new players need to gain access to networks' infrastructure and capabilities. However, it must be done in a traceable way that will not compromise network security and integrity. Therefore, the development of standardized interfaces to the network has become a necessity.
For a few years now, 3GPP, in conjunction with other standardization bodies, has developed an Open Service Access (OSA) specification also referred to as Parlay/OSA. Its main objective is to provide Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for service development and deployment in telecommunications networks. On the business side, OSA is closer to third party service suppliers than network operators. In that sense, the focus of the group is on getting a wide range of network-oriented APIs. The APIs are built toward giving third party service suppliers access to the operator's network equipment functionalities.
At the present moment, user subscription information to a third party service is maintained by the third party service supplier. However, the third party services are mostly based on events occurring in the operator's network. Therefore, the third party-service supplier must ask the network operator to add triggers on corresponding events for each of its subscribed user. This registration process to third party services causes several problems. One of these problems is the number of different triggers that has to be maintained with consistency by the third party service supplier. Indeed, each modification in registration of any third party service results in modifications to a network operator's trigger database. Another problem arises because the registration of each trigger is performed by the third party service supplier into the operator's network. In fact, the network operator has no way of authenticating that the user allows the third party service supplier to receive the notification corresponding to each trigger. Yet another problem comes from the fact that the operator needs to open access to its network databases to third party service supplier. In some cases, it might be difficult to maintain consistent data in the network databases when new entries and or modifications to existing ones are made without the operator's control.
As it can be appreciated, there is a need for better service subscription information maintenance while providing third party services. The present invention provides such a solution.